9 SEO Trends which are Going to Rule the Future

Every business which has come online wants more traffic on their website. Many businesses spend millions of dollars every year to get more traffic. Yet most effective way of getting more eyeballs is to rank high on search engines.

Companies has understood the importance of search engine optimization and have been trying various methods to rank on search engines. Search engines on the other hand have been evolving their algorithms lately to stay relevant to their audiences.

Google, which has the maximum share of search engine market guide businesses about latest seo trends or best practices which it considers while ranking.

1. No one loves to wait

Loading time of your website is one of the top on-page seo factors which are considered by search engines while ranking your website. Chances of your website ranking on first page decreases exponentially if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

High page load time is one of the important factors of high bounce rate, hence it has to be controlled in order to reduce bounce rate of your website.

In this age of smartphones, no body likes to wait for a web page to load. Google has understood this behavior and made changes in its algorithm long back.

According to data released by Google, the probability of bounce increases by up to 123% with the increase in page load time 2.

Fun Fact: According to the first page of Google statistics, a top-ranking website has an average speed of 1900 ms1.

You see that optimizemarketing.org is loading under 2 seconds. You know how I was able to achieve this?

Tips

Optimizing page speed by reducing image size.

Minify CSS and javascript on your page.

Use caching to fasten web page load time.

2. Linkless Backlinks

This has been one of the latest seo trends and have come as a shocker to most SEO’s. You may be wondering that if it is linkless than how’s it a backlink. Right?

Actually, backlinks have always been an important trust factor for search engines in their algorithms. But now search engine leader has realized that if people are talking about your brand (even without linking back), then it is important.

If your website is mobile friendly,t hen you’ll see the following result:

On the other hand, if your website is not mobile-friendly, then you’ll see the following result:

Tip

If your website is not mobile-friendly then hire a developer to get it.

If you’re using a CMS like WordPRess, then most of the themes are responsive. Try and get a new one today!

4. Be More Secure- SSL

Consumer security is a major concern for Google and it has started working on it. If your website is not SSL secured, then your user might get a notification that “connection with this website is not secure”.

Google has also announced that it is going to mark all the websites which are not with HTTPS as “not secure”.

You may understand that importance of Google’s emphasis on security by the fact that more than 25% of top 10 search results use HTTPS. And mark my words, if you don’t want to be left behind then get SSL certificate for your website today.

SEO Hacker’s spread of keyword rankings have Increased by as much as 26% by shifting to HTTPS 4.

Cloudtech has also noticed a change of almost double in the number of their top 10 rankings after making the change 4.

Their online page visibility has also increased significantly after the switch as you can see in the graph below.

In fact, according to some projections more than 50% of all searches would be voice searches by 20202.

According to Google, more than 20% of mobile queries are voice searches5.

One of the most common type of search query in voice searches is question like “who”, “how”, “where”, “when” and “what”.

“Who” type of searches are leading the pack with maximum increase yoy basis.

Below is an interesting infographic 5 shared by Google by segmenting the users on the basis of age. It shows the purpose of using voice search by each age group. It can give you an interesting insight that adults use voice search for navigational purpose amounting to 40%.

On the other hand, favorite activity of teens to use voice search is to call someone. It has the maximum share of their voice searches

You would have got from the above data that if you’re not optimizing your website for voice search, then you may lose a lot in the coming days.

Tip

Try not to use flash or complex javascript on your web page.

Try to keep your content in natural/ conversational language i.e. the way we talk.

6. Long & Rich Content

You must have heard of the phrase “Content is King”. Search engines take it very seriously, especially Google favors those who write detailed content. They have never mentioned this officially but Content pages of 1,500 words or more are performing better in the search engine rankings3. They draw more organic traffic than pages with shorter content.

According to some studies, people spend more time of pages with long-form content and these pages also get more shares and backlinks.

Moz and Buzzsumo did a combined study 6 to analyze more than 489,128 text based articles. Their study revealed some interesting stats:

More than 85% of articles are less than 1000 words.

Long content attracts more shares and backlinks.

Another study from Backlinko suggests that the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words6.

Tip

Don’t just create content, make it more detailed with lot of information.

While adding more content, try to make it richer in terms of targeted keywords

Try to write on evergreen content ideas. You can check Google Trends for the same.

Search and include case studies, statistics etc. to increase the quality of content.

7. Snippets just got Richer

This is one of the emerging seo trends of the recent times. Though Google has not commented on this, but search results tell us a different story. Many top search engine results have rich snippets along with it.

Rich snippets are actually enhanced information given by Google on the results page which can be in the form of an image, small details.

As we have said that there’s no proof that rich snippets help in increasing the search engine ranking, but it does help in getting more clicks which leads to better CTR and traffic. The later two can help you in search engine rankings as it shows the search engine that your content is useful for users.

Tip

9. Local SEO is more Important

If you’ve not focused on local seo till now, then you’re missing out on a lot of traffic. Optimizing website for local seo is a major seo trend right now. Some of the below mentioned facts will amaze you:

46% of all Google searches are local

18% of local smartphone searches led to purchase within a day compared to 7% on non-local searches.

If you want your website to rank higher on Google then start focusing on local.

Tip

Optimize your website for mobile, as most of local searches happen from mobile.

Create your Google MyBusiness page and list yourself on Google Maps.

Start asking for reviews from your customers.

Over to You

Some SEO trends will evolve every year aiming to bring better results for users. But some will remain constant like content is king.

If you want to remain relevant and attain high rankings search engine results, then you need to stay on top of these SEO trends.

If you think that I missed something than don’t hesitate to interact in the comments section below.

Recently just found Gravatar can actually slowly a page loading time. I was kept on receiving alert from Google saying one of my posts that receive lot of traffics is loading slow. After I check with gtmetrix only found out gravatar is the culprit. I then disable the avatar setting and the page speed immediate loading fast.

[…] even wait until the New Year. There are tons of opportunities with local SEO, as according to an Optimize Marketing article, 18% of local smartphone searches led to a purchase within a day, compared to 7% of non-local […]